SMART INFRASTRUCTURE: THE TECH IS ALREADY HERE

"Overhaul our nation's electricity grid, enabling smart meters and home control to conserve energy. The tech's there, we're not." -- Patrick Dixon

"Water organizations in the U.S. are incredibly fragmented--and so is the information they have to manage, whether it's about water usage, availability, quality, snow pack, levee status, or ecosystem health. My hunch is that some large proportion of anything we spend on water infrastructure will be wasted if we do not attend to the information systems." -- Peter Williams

"Smart highways. New infrastructure investment needs to include not only the technologies of the 20th century--shovels, steel, and concrete--but also those that take us into the 21st century. To manage congestion and incidents, traffic engineers make use of lane control to close highway lanes as needed; however, only 6% of freeway miles have the technology to permit lane control.

"Modern technologies...are available now. They do not require shovels, for the most part, but rather computer chips, algorithms, communication networks, etc. They are also in many cases implemented widely already in other developed countries around the world." -- Laura Wynter

"Create a cyberinfrastructure that would create transparency and accountability [among] federal, state, and local governments and the private sector. The objectives, cost, payoff, and risk of each element should be monitored and reported." -- Brenda

FROM THE EXPERTS

"We need to emphasize smarter roads--sensors that detect 'nonrecurring' traffic disruptions (the cause of an estimated one-third of traffic delays), for instance, and intelligent traffic signals and speed limits that react to changing conditions." -- Tom Vanderbilt, author, Traffic

"While the primary purpose of the economic recovery package will be to motivate job creation and the economy in a one- to two-year period, it is equally important to include measures that generate growth and prosperity for many years to come. A carefully constructed federal investment of $20 billion to $36 billion in education technology, in schools, can meet the short-term stimulus requirements and strengthen our economy for the long term." -- Jim Goodnight, Founder, Analytics Software Developer SAS

"For `shovel-ready' infrastructure projects, include features that will bring health. If we're building roads, add bike paths. For buildings, put in open stairwells to encourage people to move--and windows so they can enjoy the sunlight. For 'wire-ready' projects, build a seamless network between our health system and our citizens. People would have access to their records. Municipalities would have access to health information." -- Julie Gerberding, Outgoing Director, Centers for Disease Control